Can you do this?

--> yes you can, with a little help

One of the biggest things holding most people back from writing more emails (or getting started) is the belief they won’t be able to come up with enough decent ideas.

It’s understandable: stare at a blank screen often enough and you begin to get the idea that you just aren’t all that great at this creativity thing.

The weird thing is, it’s often a whole lot easier to come up with great ideas for someone else. Let me prove it to you

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I want you to imagine you’re a business coach and you’re going to write a short email sharing tips about time management. To make the email interesting you want to use a little personal story or anecdote.

Next, I want you to think of a handful of personal stories from your own life that might be relevant to time management. But I don’t want you to start from nothing: I want you to look at some specific areas.

First, think of a time from your childhood when you were late for something. In my case it could be the time I missed the start of my A-level physics exam because I thought it was in the afternoon when it was in fact in the morning.

Next, think of a time from early in your career when you struggled with something time-management related. Maybe you got overworked and dropped the ball on a big project. Maybe you started missing deadlines.

In my case I remember very clearly the time where my “system” of simply being able to remember everything I had to do started to fall over and I forgot a few important things. It was a huge hit to my ego at the time.

Next, think of an epiphany you had or something cool you did with time management more recently. In my case it was probably when I realised I was spending more time trying out and switching to fancy new time management systems than I would ever save if I adopted them, no matter how good they were. So I switched to something really simple and stuck with it.

Finally, think of a film or TV show where time was a vital element. In my case I immediately thought of Dr Who and the current TV show The Lazarus Project. But also John Cleese’s film Clockwise.

Here’s the thing: that little bit of brainstorming probably took you how long? Maybe 2 minutes?

And you probably found it fairly easy to come up with at least one example in each of the 4 areas. That basically gives you at least 4 interesting ways of illustrating an email with some time management tips.

Easy.

All you have to do is apply the same technique to the ideas and tips you want to get across for yourself.

Except…there’s a trick to doing it.

You see for some reason it’s normally much harder to think of examples for your own tips and ideas than it is for someone else’s. I’ll explain why next time and show you how you can get round it.

- Ian

PS I explain this method in a lot more depth and show you how to get real results from it in the “Infitine idea generator” module of the Effective and Engaging Email newsletter course. Click here for details.